Jonathan Lethem
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is a murder mystery with a twist—a first person narrator with Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This unlikely hero, Lionel Essrog, unravels the mystery of his mentor’s murder while plagued with rapid and uncontrollable explosions of verbal and physical tics consisting of nonsensical babble, barking, touching, tapping, counting, poking, and, basically, rending asunder the English language. As the first-person narrator, Essrog delivers inside access to a life with Tourette’s. He takes the reader for a raucous ride.
The narrative opens with Lionel as an orphan in St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. Along comes the mysterious Frank Minna who offers Lionel and three other orphans a chance to earn money while running various errands for him. It soon becomes obvious to the boys that their mentor is somehow affiliated with gangsters and the tasks he assigns them are legally suspect. But, no matter. The boys remain loyal to Frank and grow into adulthood under his mentorship.
When Frank is murdered, Lionel sets himself the task of discovering his murderer. Unable to control his Tourettic compulsions, he, nevertheless, approaches the task systematically. He faces a loaded gun on a few occasions but survives relatively unscathed and somehow manages to cobble together the pieces of the puzzle to unravel the mystery.
Lionel has difficulty communicating with others and calming his mind. He delivers a precise play-by-play of his verbal and physical anomalies as if he were observing a separate entity that just happens to reside inside his body. We witness his inner struggles as he tries to suppress his physical and verbal tics from becoming externally manifest. These details generate understanding for his condition and sympathy for the character whose mind we have come to inhabit. We want him to succeed. Meanwhile, against this ricocheting mental backdrop is his determination to find Frank Minna’s killer.
Motherless Brooklyn is a solid murder mystery. But Lethem’s most impressive achievement is his compelling portrayal of a narrative voice that reveals the inner workings of the Tourettic mind. In creating a narrator with Tourette’s Syndrome, Jonathan Lethem successfully captures the dilemma of an unfiltered mind that runs helter-skelter in all directions. His ability to do so is uncanny. And he does so with compassion, sensitivity, and humor. We come to know Lionel. And some of us come to like him.
Recommended.